Tag Archives: Night Job Movie

Editors and sound technicians typically don’t get the praises that directors, writers, and actors do because their contributions are to highlight the action on the screen. While actors and directors tend to have ups and downs before eventually falling out of favor, many of the top editors and sound people tend to amass hundreds of credits over several decades. This has to do with the consistency they bring to their craft. Perhaps more than anybody, they are responsible for giving the movies the major seamless factor that audiences crave.

You really appreciate how much a great editor and sound department add when one or both of these elements aren’t good. Unfortunately in the new indie film, Night Job, both the editing and sound are severely lackluster throughout. Several stretches where the last syllables of words are snipped off or where whole sentences are MIA make the amateurishness painfully obvious.

One of the principals of editing is to trim the banality of everyday life and focus on the extraordinary. The filmmakers of Night Job took that rule too literally. They employ a consistent, but arbitrary pseudo jump cut (but it’s too sloppy and undisciplined to be accurately called jump cuts) motif of snipping out characters walking from one part of the lobby to another. Not only is this the most jarring element, it brings the most attention to Night Job’s biggest failure; it’s a sluggish bore. Night Job only runs for 82 minutes, but the low energy directing and bland, talky script make it feel like a grueling 8 hour school day.

Courtesy of @NightJobMovie

In an early scene the protagonist James, a temp doorman/receptionist in a NYC apartment complex on his first night who is already bored and disillusioned with the job, and a man who works as a night shift doorman in another building discuss the skeeviness that is more rampant in the evening. “Why do you think things get crazier at night?” James asks. “People just use the night to become someone different.”

Although several characters whine about craziness, not enough craziness transpires on screen. When I lived in the North East, I enjoyed people watching because I found many Yankees wonderfully expressive and idiosyncratic even when they were curt and testy. There were several instances where Night Job seemed like it would delve into the interesting dynamic between customers and a service industry worker where either party might hesitate for a millisecond or come on too strongly, setting off the other who starts shouting, causing the other person to sass back for a heated (yet bizarrely humorous) back and forth.

Instead, James’ encounters with a revolving cast of slightly neurotic characters follow a staid track, and he never truly gets sucked in the drama. Nobody hurls any abuse at him, which is perhaps the most improbable element in this film, because people in the service industry are punching bags. Actually, the characters are too restrained and polite; it’s hard to achieve comedy from (relatively) good manners.

Courtesy of @NightJobMovie

Every now and again, there are references about the previous doorman, who a character early on warns James was into some sketchy dealings with homeless people. Presumably this is important to the plot and could have been a source for black humor, but this storyline is so haphazardly applied and is only memorable for the fact that it results in one of the most amateurishly choreographed fight scenes I have ever seen. (It fares badly even by home movie standards).

When I interviewed several film professionals about their pet peeves in modern movies, a program director emphatically stated that shooting movies in black and white for no apparent reason put her off most. Movies like Night Job make me see her point. The black and white cinematography (which I assume is supposed to signify James’ humdrum and mildly depressing life) is not only arbitrary, but also is aesthetically wrong for this film. The mise en scene of the lobby is shiny, industrial, clean, and modern; in short, antithetical to the shadowy, claustrophobic film noir imagery that the cinematography is trying to invoke.

One tiny thing working in the filmmakers’ favor is their restraint in using the musical score (which is not good, but not awful) in an era where many films (even some good films) overburden the audience with a soundtrack, hoping it will act as life support for a lifeless story.